Adding a hard drive

[Justin Thyme]

I recently suffered a 60GB hard drive failure and had a new 80GB one
installed because of the long wait anticipated for the replacement,under
warranty,of the original by the manufacturer.The (refurbished) replacement
has now arrived.Can this be added to my computer as a second hard drive and
are there any pitfalls to watch out for? Thanks.

 

[JerryM \(ID\)]

No problem, as long as you have the right cables.
You will probably have to format it.
Your BIOS needs to recognize it first.
If you hook it up with the same ribbon cable, with a second connector, set the jumper for slave.

 

[Justin Thyme]

No problem, as long as you have the right cables.
You will probably have to format it.
Your BIOS needs to recognize it first.
If you hook it up with the same ribbon cable, with a second connector, set
the jumper for slave.

Thanks,mate.

 

[Alex Nichol]

I recently suffered a 60GB hard drive failure and had a new 80GB one
installed because of the long wait anticipated for the replacement,under
warranty,of the original by the manufacturer.The (refurbished) replacement
has now arrived.Can this be added to my computer as a second hard drive and
are there any pitfalls to watch out for?

Should be possible to just plug it in - with jumper appropriately set,
and I would make it master device on the secondary IDE cable. At boot,
go into BIOS setup to make sure it is properly detected, then in XP,
Control Panel - Admin Tools - Computer Management, select Disk
Management and look lower right for the graphic of the drive. R-click
Unallocated space and take Create Partition (following through to format
it)

 

[Al Smith]

I recently suffered a 60GB hard drive failure and had a new 80GB one

installed because of the long wait anticipated for the replacement,under
warranty,of the original by the manufacturer.The (refurbished) replacement
has now arrived.Can this be added to my computer as a second hard drive and
are there any pitfalls to watch out for? Thanks.

Refurbished hard drives usually don't last that long, although
sometimes you get lucky. All you need is an open plug on one of
your IDE ribbon cables, and you're in business. You've got two IDE
cables in your computer, each with two plugs, for a total of four
places to put a drive.

Your C drive is plugged into the end of the primary IDE cable, so
if you stick your second hard drive behind it on the same cable,
that would mean you would set the little jumper at the back of the
drive to "slave" and make sure that the jumper on the C drive is
set to "master"; or for the sake of simplicity set the jumpers on
both drives to "cable select".

In the likely event that your CD or DVD is taking up the second
plug on your primary IDE channel, you could put the refurbished
drive on the second ribbon cable. If you put it in the plug on the
end, set it to "master" and if you put it on the plug further down
the cable, set it to "slave" -- unless it's the only thing on the
cable, in which case you should put it as "single" on the end of
the cable. Or, to avoid all this jumper confusion, set it as
"cable select".

It really doesn't matter where you put a second drive, as long as
your jumpers are set properly. And by setting all drives and CDs
or DVDs as "cable select" you can usually get things working fine.
Then just pop in the setup floppy that came with the drive (or
download the drive setup software from the manufacturer's Web
site), boot from the floppy, go through the drive recognition
process, and you're in business.